Guillermo Kuitca On His Immersive, David Lynch-Inspired Installation at the Fondation Cartier (Guillermo Kuitca à propos de son installation immersive inspirée de David Lynch à la Fondation Cartier)

Tess Thackara

Dec 10, 2014 10:37 am

Guillermo Kuitca and David Lynch aren’t often spoken about in the same sentence. Despite a decades-long career and international acclaim, the cerebral Argentine painter Kuitca keeps a remarkably low profile, while the off-beat auteur Lynch has become a cult figure whose lesser-known artistic practice plays second fiddle to his film career and reputation as the creator of Twin Peaks. But in “Les Habitants,” Kuitca’s sprawling, site-specific installation at the Fondation Cartier, marking its 30th anniversary, he conjures the ghosts of artists past and present who haunt his practice, including David Lynch—revealing the surprising points of resonance between their work.

Known for his absorbing, nuanced paintings of maps, viral networks, architectural plans, cubist murals, and spare, psychologically charged interiors, Kuitca creates work that is characterized by its indeterminacy. The mysterious spaces of Kuitca’s imagination can feel conversely like a refuge or a threat. Looking at his paintings, mixed-media works, and installations, you never quite know where you are, but an uncanny sense of the familiar, and of the foreboding promise of action pervades the experience—recalling the surreal, seductive worlds of Lynch’s films. At the Fondation, he reinvents a red living room created by Lynch at the institution in 2007, covering the walls with his fragmented mural patterns, installing a recording of a concert staged by Lynch and Patti Smith in the space, and borrowing its name, “Les Habitants,” from a film by the Armenian Artavazd Pelechian. I spoke to Kuitca about the project, and his larger practice, after he had returned home from Paris.

Tess Thackara: Your current exhibition at the Fondation Cartier was largely inspired by David Lynch’s 2007 exhibition “The Air is on Fire,” also at the Fondation Cartier. Can you tell me about your particular interest in David Lynch’s work and how you began to think about this project?

Guillermo Kuitca: To give you some context, I didn’t know David Lynch’s work before I saw that exhibition. Of course, I was a big fan of his movies, but I didn’t know his work as a painter, designer, photographer, and so on, which is so vast and rich. I happened to be in Paris at the time of that show, and it was that particular piece, the one that I’m now revisiting, that somehow got me, took me by surprise. I cannot say that I liked it or loved it. I felt quite lost at that show—I didn’t know what I was looking at. I wasn’t really sure if what I was looking at was a piece that was supposed to be seen from the back, from the front, or whether it was a series of props. I almost thought it was something that wasn’t finished. It was more about feeling lost, and feeling unease. It was an awkward piece, actually, that living room. For whatever reason, that got stuck in my head.

Seven or eight years later, Grazia Quaroni, one of the curators of [Fondation] Cartier, was in Buenos Aires and visited me to propose I do something for Cartier’s 30th anniversary. Immediately, with a kind of instantaneous reaction, I said, “What about this? I always remember that piece. Would it be interesting if I revisited that living room?”—which actually was already David revisiting his own drawing from the late ’70s. And she said, “Yes, draw whatever you want. And send us a few drafts, ideas, whatever.” And I started to play with that and somehow juxtaposed images that I was working on. Over the last few years I have been working outside of the canvas. I had started to paint works in rooms and create projects in spaces. The one that I did in in Somerset for Hauser & Wirth was very important to me. I felt very connected to that. And somehow I wanted to keep exploring the creation of spaces. I found that to put myself in other artists’ footprints was very liberating. That’s how it started.

GK: I think by saying “liberating,” I mean that the fact that it was a previously conceived piece by a very well-known artist didn’t mean that I had to pay homage. There were no areas that I wouldn’t allow myself to go, or to touch, or to change. I felt that I could enter that space and create something with—not necessarily a blank canvas—but almost as if it were something that could go in any direction. Of course at that stage, it was just a project. Then obviously we needed David Lynch’s approval. Probably because I’m a painter, I’m very used to working with a canvas, which in a way is already a limit that is pre-established by height and width, so…

TT: So you’re used to working with parameters. And your work is often richly intertextual and full of references to other artists. How do you think about your work as engaging those practices and histories?

GK: Yeah. I think that, playing a little bit with the title of the show, I feel inhabited by the history of the art I have seen and I like, so it’s a sort of natural flow. It’s not necessarily an essay, or coming from a discourse—it’s a very elaborated piece, but it doesn’t come from an elaborated process. Well, actually that’s not entirely true; the process is quite elaborate! But art history came from experience rather than knowledge that I apply to certain works. I started somehow to feel inhabited by a sort of modernist language after 2007, which I still use these days. But I don’t know exactly why that happened, actually! [Laughs].

TT: You have applied that modernist language—cubist-style murals—to the walls of spaces in environmental works in recent years. Are your works in three-dimensional space simply an extension of painting?

GK: That was an interesting process for me because as a painter, somehow you inhabit such a two-dimensional world, and you’re so used to that—you know, I’ve been painting all my life. I think I struggle with the limits of every painting, and the expansion and possibilities of painting, probably like any contemporary painter. To be honest, as a painter you always have sort of the will, or the wish, or the illusion that working in three dimensions would be good for you—it would be one of those moments where you go, “That day will be important, that day will come.” Actually what happened to me was that I was doing these paintings with this sort of viral structure that was easy to move around, because it was more like a pattern. The first piece I did in that way was in my own studio. I was working, I was painting and maybe without really thinking twice, I was painting a wall in the studio in the corner. And then I kept going. So the switch, the swap between two and three [dimensions] was natural, in a way. I still go back and forth. And I don’t see a big difference in terms of how I engage one work or the other.

The works that I did for the “Les Habitants” at Cartier are a bit more complex; it’s not just a pictorial installation at all. But making those rooms, like the ones I did in my own studio, the one I did in England, and the one I created like a cube that I showed in New York in March—it was different as an outcome, but it in the end it was still pretty much myself in front of a surface.

TT: There is a sort of cryptic open-endedness in your work—in fragments of narratives or maps of undetermined spaces. Given that sense of indeterminacy in your work, how do you know when you’re finished with a piece?

GK: It’s one of the more intuitive moments of the process, the finishing of a piece. And of course the unfinished quality of something really plays a main role. But I remember at one point, I wanted to leave work unfinished in sort of as arbitrary a way as possible. Like if the telephone will ring, I will stop working at that moment, and somehow the painting will absorb that—like the artist just left the studio and never came back. For some reason, that very arbitrary moment tends to impart a particular energy to the works. I don’t always do that, otherwise it would be too gimmicky or totally formalistic. But today I think it’s always a major moment when you decide, “This is it.” Actually, for the Cartier exhibition, I would say that—because it’s more like a curatorial process, in a way—I had to finish the project; it’s not like, [laughs] you know, I could leave a few bunches of crates and cables; that would have been very, very, very different and they could have probably been very mad at me if I hadn’t [finished] it. But in some of the paintings or small pieces that I work on in my studio, I still very much look forward to that moment of deciding when something is done.

GK: That depends on the work. Some works like the maps or some architectural pieces are more slow in terms of process because they grow slowly. For instance, if I do a piece all by pencil, it will take a long time, sometimes a whole year. Even if I don’t work daily on that piece, I know it will develop into something that is more like a preconceived image. Normally I don’t work with studies, but I do make studies from the paintings, so in a way it’s like reversing the process of making studies—to understand what I’ve done, rather than knowing what I’m going to do. And those works are not necessarily fast, I’m not painting the work in a day, but if the decision was right and I had a good session, it probably will be. I think I have multiple processes happening at the same time.

I might not have an image in mind, but maybe I have one clue, like I’ll use yellow, I’ll use black. The last couple of years I have worked pretty much with the same palette. I prefer to use my diaries for doodling or killing time. I have this circular piece that is a daily nothingness, in a way. I let that piece be the one that absorbs all this vagary, all these moments where I don’t know what to do. And in a way, the accumulation of that gives a depth to it. But if I start a work with no image, nor a clue, it’s very, very likely that that painting will end in the trash can or will be completely covered, to start over again.

TT: In the case of your Fondation Cartier installation, I imagine that process involved a lot more people than perhaps you’re used to—except for your work on the stage sets you have created. Can you talk a bit about the collaboration involved in creating “Les Habitants”?

GK: Well, it was interesting. This project took me by surprise, because after I decided to do this revisiting of David Lynch’s living room, it was the [Fondation] Cartier that decided to give me carte blanche to keep going and create a whole exhibition. And yes, going back to your question, it was through this process that I came across a lot of artisans. I mean, it’s really a very hand-made show. And that, I think, had to do a little bit with the French tradition of artisans that is still pretty alive. And so a lot of people jumped into the project—from the textiles of the walls, of the ceilings, to the more high-tech crew for the LED screen, the sound engineer, the crew of painters who somehow translated my imagery into sort of a duotone painting for the walls, and the decorators at Cartier.

The idea of being more immersive and involved with more people in a project is not something that appeals to me just by default; it has to be the right people and the right project. And this was definitely the right people and the right project. I have done some set designs and probably I will do it in the future, but I’m not a set designer. I have created a few theater curtains, which involve other people, but I’m not an artisan and used to working with other people all the time. So if I don’t feel that I’m completely immersed and have a really important understanding from the other side, I’m miserable doing that because most of the time I work by myself. So sometimes I think it’s a joy to be doing work with other people, and sometimes I think it’s exactly the opposite. But in this case it was definitely a joy.

TT: What are you working on now? What are some of the challenges that are preoccupying you?

GK: Actually, I haven’t started to work since I came back from Paris. [Laughs]. I was so exhausted that I had nothing [to give]. It’s an interesting moment, though, because there have only been a few times over a long career in which my work didn’t start where the previous one finished. Pretty much all my work is just sort of a chain reaction to the previous works. But now I feel that if I take this moment seriously, I will feel that I should explore this sort of an empty canvas that I feel I’m inhabiting now and see where that takes me. Because it might take me to something interesting. And so the problem I’m facing actually is how to start to work again. It was a very busy year, a lot of projects. I don’t remember having a year like the one I just had. And so maybe next year I will spend more time in the studio. I don't know which problems I’ll have, but I will have a lot of problems, that’s for sure! [Laughs]